Leg 2: Backtrack to Bellatrix, onward to Saiph
17 Jan 2022Aurora Bael
Eyyy ya girl's staying out in the black.Drunk and lonely, I started going through some of my old things. A box of knick-knacks and photos from when I used to kill human beings for a living. There was an old-style photograph in there of me and Conrad not long after I hooked up with his unit. I looked like hell. All emaciated and pale, sunken eyes and cheeks, but I'm grinning like a pig in shit just looking at him. After he merc'd my owner right in front of me and whisked me off to space in a, erm, "liberated" Clipper, how could I not fall in love? ...Shame things worked out the way they did. Don't get me wrong, he was a piece of shit and I'm glad he's dead. But you never forget your first. You never forget the one who brought you there. The one who showed you
Well, that was a weird tangent. Anyway, under all that old garbage was a sealed pack of synthaderm dressings! I was practically giggling as I put them all on. A long sleep later, and I've got chalk-white patches of skin all over but the pain is manageable and the fever's gone. I'm set for another couple of weeks with the provisions on hand! So I threw on a fresh flight suit, hopped in the chair, and beat sand for Saiph.
Nope. Wrong answer. I checked the star chart and realized I completely forgot Bellatrix. So I got moving back the way I came. Sigh.
Interesting space out this way, though. The further I get out the weirder stuff starts to look.
I never get over how pretty this shit looks when it lines up just right. I could stay out here just jumping around looking at it all for years.
That said, there's a lot of unremarkable stuff out here, too. Dark, cold places with a microbe or two kicking around and nothing else of value to write home about. I implemented that rule I was talking about: no more than two hours looking for a species before moving on. It's hard sometimes to call it off, but after spending so long hunting down that one fucking fungoid, I can't be arsed. I'll run myself out of food if I spend that kind of time on every single investigation.
So when a triple-hit came up with another fungoid to find, I was pumped. I wanted that fungoid so fuckin' bad, just to prove they actually do exist, so I got INTO it. Like waaay too into it. I'm hooning around canyons like a test pilot and Bradbury is loving it! She is hugging the walls and dancing around spires like a barn swallow. And you know what, I had a goddamn blast doing it, too. Reminds me why I got into flying in the first place. And you know what? Two hours later I hadn't found a single goddamn fungoid. Nothing.
I did, however, find plenty of the osseus lying around.
Whole groves of them even! I couldn't spit in a direction without hitting one. It was nuts. And it gave me a chance to get this shot of one of the peaks that ran through this region in ribbons. I'm about half-way up this one. Those two little dots up at the top there are two more of these osseus pumice. Still no fungoid. Drat.
I tagged Bellatrix, and since there are no planets orbiting that enormous white malestrom, I turned back around directly for Saiph. And about three jumps later I see a geologically active world about 3000 ls out. And no one has ever stood on it before. Naturally, I had to go. Landing though was a bit, eh, rough, if I'm honest. Trying to be slick and slide right into a low glide, I miscalculated and ate SHIT. Tore off my shield in one smack, and then the poor thing bounced. I nosed her up fast enough to avoid a second bounce, then set her down to have a look. Thankfully, nothing too serious. Frame's a little scuffed up, and panel under the port main thruster got dented up pretty good, but all the subsystems are green and hull integrity reads...76%.
For that? Nah. I'm not going back. Bradbury is a tough bird, she can hack it. I just gotta be more careful. I took this trip precisely to learn these lessons. Besides, I had to go stand next to a Lava spout I found.
"But Rory," you say, "weren't you just very badly burned?"
Yes I was dear friend. And clearly I have learned nothing.
Psyche! I'm like 10 meters away from that thing, it's just a tight angle. I'm not that thick.
Two jumps later, I came upon another clump of moons no one has ever explored before. And this little planetary system hadn't even been mapped before! So, doing my part for The Stellar Cartographer's Guild (christ I cannot believe they let me in), I decided to
It was a hell of a trek to get out there, but wow, what a pretty little system. Rings were absolutely BURSTING with Benitoite and Void Opals. I'll have to mark the system in case I can get a carrier out this way some time. This one isn't a trick of the angle, those two moons really orbit that close. The Giant is, of course, much further off. But that near one, mottled red? That's yer wan. So I picked a crater in the fungoid's range, and I took her in nice and easy. Buttered the goddamn bread on this landing. And what do I see out my front window?
Fungoids. Right in my lap. Bright green ones you couldn't miss if you were paid to. And thankfully I'm paid not to. It wasn't just them, either. Everything was there. I didn't have to go but 4 km from my first footfall to find all five of the species that have plastered themselves to this rock. I never saw so much diversity in one place on any world that wasn't terraformed or otherwise near-identical to Earth, where it makes sense. So rarely do you see something that's clearly alien like this. Apparently it's a tussock, but it's unlike any one I've seen yet. But the codex says they've been sighted on at least six other worlds, many hundreds of lightyears from here.
(Seriously what the fuck is this?)
And that causes one to wonder... How in hell did we get here? That's a question in two parts though, ain't it? First, how do all of these species show up on so many different planets, light years apart? How are they all so obviously derived from or related to each other?
This colony... I've seen these things before in Jameson's Demise. There are places the ground is covered in these colonies as far as the eye can see. Probably seen them on three other planetoids, too. How do they get here? How related are they? Sure, vista is working on it, they're the ones paying me to come sample them so they can figure that out. But I have my own means of production now. I should see if I could get a lab set up in the crew quarters. I can sure afford most of the equipment at this point.
These things. They're basically half-way between cyanobacteria and a filter feeder like a coral. Here, in damn-near vacuum conditions are forms not too unlike the tropical oceans of Earth. The same place I came from... well, in a manner of speaking. But I needed a ship to do it. Without that, the trip would take... eons. Something is going on here. Maybe if I get a lab set up I can start coming up with some kind of answer. The common explanations are not cutting it.
And when did I have this alarming realization? When did I suddenly happen to care about the origins of life in the universe, so much so that I'm turning a bunk into a lab? Why, during target practice, naturally.
So, that brings us to the second part. I reckon I could ask that about myself. "How did I get here?" Squalor to slavery made sense. We were starving, homeless, completely without means, so of course I was given up to someone who would "take care of me". Ugh. What a joke. Slavery to mercenary even has its own kind of sense. Girl gets beat to a pulp by the system, works to tear apart agents of that system whenever and however she can as soon as she gets a chance. But how did I go from killing human beings for money to taking up a sextant and a test tube?
Oh yeah. For this.
Blood and thunder is fun for a while, if you're any good at it. Turning corpses into paychecks is power, pure and simple. A raw exercise of might by one person over another. When you're behind the trigger, no one gets to tell you no. No one gets to try and harm you. They are required to obey you, or give their lives into your hands. When they're sick bastards who get off on torture and exploitation, it's an incredible rush for someone who couldn't leave her house without permission her whole life. You get hungry for it. I got hungry for it. And that's why I grew to hate it. Because at the end of the day, when the pile around me was high enough, the rush faded away long enough to allow me to reflect on what that made me.
No. I don't want to play that game anymore. I know myself well enough to know I'll find a way to justify doing it again sooner or later. But the best lesson I've learned so far, one I don't think I'll ever forget...
Soaring through the black feels even better.
Stay Frosty. Don't forget.
- Rory